The American Dream - live your life on your terms and love your life - seems to have been replaced with get a job and buy a house. It doesn't matter that you hate your job and you are in debt for the rest of your life. It seems the American Dream has been realized by many as a nightmare. Working a job you hate for 40 years is an unfulfilling life experience, and what's the point in owning a home when you can never pay it off, and you are basically a serf for the bank. Our nation is regressing. Worker's rights are being stripped, real incomes are dropping, more people are having their property taken from them because their job was taken from them, older people are feeling less secure, so they cannot retire, some are forced to choose between various expenses and medical bills. Kids are coming out of college with 50K of debt, with no guarantee of a good paying job. I know a lot of you are from the UK but I'm sure you can understand what I'm talking about. Do you feel that the American dream has become a nightmare?
What American dream? Our country threw the American dream out the window when we shipped all our jobs over seas. Right now 75% of America earns a income at the poverty level, and people are loosing their homes left and right. Right now I would say its the American Nightmare!
I'm not from the US but I've been feeling the pinch, too. I agree with Soulwatcher a lot of it has to do with outsourcing. Outsourcing excludes a significant proportion of people from making a proper living especially those who work in manufacturing and customer service centers. I also think has to do with the baby boomers not willing to invest more into the future generation during the times of prosperity. During those times and now, people were all to eager to elect the politician that promised the biggest tax cut, considering where the money for the tax cut comes from. Many social, health, and educational programs were slashed, neglecting the fact solutions cost more than prevention. Kids who have nowhere to after school fall into bad crowds, dropout and become a liability on the system. The media doesn't help either by making kids all starry-eyed about being celebrities, teen moms or Jersey Shore slackers. College doesn't look too appeal once you know people who are finished with it and still working at McDonalds. Plus, the fact upper management is rewarded the most before the people who actually work on the ideas is counterproductive. The older generation is always nervous about the future of the country and they have good reason to be. A prosperous country today is characterized by the ability of its population to produce innovative ideas in the form of technology. How are these kids going to match up with such an upbringing and in such an environment?
No American dream here! So I'm living my own version of the American dream with my little family. We used to pay well over $700 a month for rent and scraped together enough money to move and buy our own mobile home. Now we pay a third of that money for lot rent and are saving so much money now. That's our version of the American dream. Is it a big house with brand new everything? No way! Then again, it's what we have and we are lucky to have that much. I've got nothing to complain about. Just recently, I was reading how some families over in India live in shanty towns and cardboard shacks and that's considered a step up from where they used to live. Can you imagine? Americans complain way too dang much. We have everything, even if we are homeless and penniless, we still have a government that will give us unemployment money, welfare money, free hospitalization for seniors and poor people/children plus food stamp/WIC money. Even with recent cuts in those funding programs, there is still money left for the truly needy. Do we have jobs? Well, the well educated college folk do, but not everyone else. It's a fact that college graduates with experience suffered less during the recent US recession and job loss than any other group. The rest of us are scraping together money any way we can. Thankfully, I stopped depending on the US economy to provide me with a good job years ago and make all my money online. So no, I have nothing to complain about.
When I think about the American Dream, I think about the idea of freedom. America is the land of the free - that is the Dream. We're still free to accomplish much, and while the unemployment rate is so high, I think there is still so much room to be thankful. My job is not ideal, but I am glad for opportunities in this country.
